


if you give a mouse a cookie

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [16]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Interns & Internships, POV Outsider, Pets, Science, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, Workplace, hazardous work conditions, well familiars but let's call our darling a pet for now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 07:20:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21370312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Mr. Parker watched Ms. Gupta go, glanced furtively into the office, and held Steph’s eye for a long, long time.“It’s a toy,” he said as the fucking rat-Cerberus in his arms squirmed.Steph did not scream. She was too cold and terrified inside to scream.“It’s a toy,” she whimpered.Mr. Parker nodded to her and then hurried off out of sight.(Intern Steph came to Stark Industries to keep her head down and her expectations low. She gets put under Mr. Parker's supervision and that shit goes right out the window.)
Relationships: Peter Parker & Pepper Potts & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Stark Industries, Peter Parker & Throckmorton the Rat King, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Steph Bautista (Stark Industries Intern) & Peter Parker, Throckmorton the Rat King & Stark Industries
Series: Inimitable Verse [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1117746
Comments: 86
Kudos: 1049





	if you give a mouse a cookie

**Author's Note:**

> so. @tortoiseoffury requested an intern fic and people on tumblr have been asking when we're going to see Throckmorton the Rat King again. And I have put on this planet with no other purpose but to give. 
> 
> Here's both. And just for reference, **here's the character list:**
> 
> Lab managers:  
Peter Parker  
Saanvi Malik  
Himani Gupta  
Leo Stanton  
Bo Kilkenny  
Avery James 
> 
> Research staff on Peter's lab team:  
Wallace  
Alverez  
Lovett  
Chao  
Lee  
Daniels

Steph was here for two things, the money and the name on her resume. Her dad told her that this was not a useful way of thinking about her acquisition of one of the best internships in the country. Her mom told her shit about being ‘grateful and proud’ of the opportunity Mr. Stark had given her.

Her fucking brother, off at MIT, bragged about her to all his gross engineering buddies, and they no doubt talked shit about how they all would have gotten that internship if not for such-and-such minor reason.

Ugh.

Disgusting.

It all tasted of unsweetened cranberry juice inside a soapy cup.

Steph was here for the money and the name. That was it. That was all. She kept her head low and her expectations lower and figured that if she just kept on doing that, then in another six months, she could gracefully fuck off to college and be well on her way away from all these nasty-ass cranberries.

She’d thought this plan had been straightforward. She’d planned on it being straightforward. But two days into the internship, it rapidly became apparent to her that A) Mr. Stark was not a straightforward man and B) misery loves company.

Stark Industries was a home for the best and the brightest, for sure, but the longer Steph was here, the more clearly she could see the note tacked on under that sign that was written in orange highlighter on a piece of lined paper that said ‘normal humans need not apply.’

They did, of course.

In droves.

But Mr. Stark weeded out the weak like a madman with a weedwhacker. The only normal people allowed to stay on staff were those screened by Ms. Potts. That meant that the PR team and the PR team only contained people who spent their weekends out shopping with their families and playing golf or whatever it was those WonderBread folks did.

Everyone else was Mr. Stark’s business and he refused to have anyone on staff whose aura did not match his own in terms of excitement and mystery. Steph’s supervisor, Lab Manager Parker, for example, spent his weekends doing something that resulted in him slinking up to the office with a broken hand or a busted elbow. Or—on one memorable occasion—a box full of cheese samples which he refused to divulge the origin of or the purpose for.

Lab Manager Parker, alongside Lab Manager James, Kilkenny, Malik, Gutpa, and Stanton were allegedly the best of the best. They’d passed Mr. Stark’s trial by flamethrower. A couple of them—Parker and James—had worked at SI before and allegedly had been dragged screaming from their former positions as research staff to become managers in the organics R&D department.

Mr. Parker, he told her, had once been an intern here just like her.

“I tried to bail six times,” he told her seriously with both hands on her desk. “If you ever want to get out, I know a garage door that they’ll never fix.”

Mr. Parker was not exactly a poster child for Stark Industries. He always seemed to be trying to escape.

The older staff said that he’d worked at SI from fifteen to nineteen as an intern, had fallen off the face of the earth, had come back for a six-month stint as a research staff member when he was around twenty one, then fell off the face of the earth again. Then he’d gotten hired on as a project hand for one of Mr. Stark’s personal projects, had gotten kidnapped by one of the competitors trying to halt progress on said project, finally quit and left to go to grad school, and then came back with the intention (and apparently some martial arts training) to do a short term stint as a project hand again. Mr. Stark had lured him in with an offer of a research staff position and, during his interview, had twisted his arm around and around until he assented to a management one instead.

There could not be a better position at the company for Mr. Parker, despite his piss poor attitude about it.

He was one of those weird folks who’d missed the day before birth where Nature or God or whoever had been doling out the ‘flight’ part of the fight or flight response.

Mr. Parker smelled danger and ran _towards_ it.

And when he found it (and by God, he always found it), he handled it. With whatever was at hand, as quickly and effectively as possible—building damage, safety procedure, and insurance policies be damned. Easy as that.

He was amazing at his job, Mr. Parker.

Steph admired him. She didn’t admire many people, but she admired how low Mr. Parker’s bullshit meter could drop in the face of imminent peril. She aspired to be able to drink Monster placidly in a room going up in flames just like him one day.

There were rumors among the interns in the lower floors that Mr. Stark was grooming Mr. Parker possibly to send him off to Horizon Labs to represent SI on the floor there.

Horizon was big shit. If Mr. Parker went there, they might as well kiss him goodbye because he was never coming back. They’d only see his name in the paper and in the best-known scientific journals after that.

Lawrence—tall, gangly Lawrence who was a six months older than Steph and had never worked a day in his life—said that he’d heard Mr. Parker start cackling at the idea of him ever going over to Horizon Labs the other day, though.

“He says he’s not good enough,” Lawrence confided in Steph in the wake of this moment.

“Anyone here is good enough,” Steph snipped back.

“Yeah, well he said that if he ever got into Horizon that he’d never make it through the doors because he'd drop dead just at the letter. He said he wants his ashes forged into a philosopher’s stone and mailed to his therapist.”

Mr. Parker was maybe a smidge dramatic.

He was among friends on this floor.

All of these lab managers were off their fucking tits. They weren’t drunk, but you wouldn’t know it if you just happened to visit on a Friday afternoon.

Steph had come here to keep her head down and her expectations low, but when Ms. Himani Gupta came screeching down the hall, demanding immediate attention and every other lab manager dropped what they were doing to come fan her decadently with paperwork while she declared that she could no longer buy muffins from the café downstairs because she’d called the barista by the wrong name, it was hard to do that.

Especially when that was followed up a mere hour later by Mr. Parker and Lab Manager Kilkenny scrambling door to door, trying to find which of the chem alarms was going off.

And _especially_ when, while they busy were doing that, their combined research staff filed out of the far lab and into the storage room across the hall. By the time the managers noticed the smoke billowing out from that room, it was too late and the floors had to be evacuated.

The staff did not apologize.

It was very, very hard to keep your head down while being evacuated for the second time that week. And it was very, very hard not to become invested in Stark Industries when everything was always so exciting, day in and day out.

Steph came here for the money and the name, but she stayed for the people.

One day, Lab Manager Saanvi Malik stuck her head into the office where Steph was watching Lawrence use a copy machine in every way but how it was intended to be and asked the two of them if they wanted to join her and her interns for a little experiment.

If Steph had ears which could have perked up, they would have.

Mr. Parker refused to let her and Lawrence do science without him present. He said that it was a liability. That was pretty rich coming from a guy whose hands constantly shook from all the caffeine he mainlined in the office. But whatever. Steph kind of got it. She was still technically a minor and Lawrence couldn’t even use a copy machine, so she couldn’t really blame Mr. Parker for his lack of confidence in their combined brain power.

That said, if there was an opportunity for getting her hands dirty, possibly scalded, she was here for it.

Ms. Malik took her and Lawrence back to one of the center labs and had them put on safety goggles and coats.

The coat made Steph feel very important. She wanted one to walk around in at home.

“Okay,” Ms. Malik said, “This is what we call a monstrosity in four parts. Also known as a ‘we’re going to fix this before Peter notices Mr. Stark gave it to us and not him.’”

“Why is it called that?” Lawrence asked with all the air in his perfectly combed chestnut head.

Ms. Malik stared at him.

“Mr. Stark has asked for discretion,” she said. “And he doesn’t want Peter to know that he broke the thing he spent three months building within three minutes of turning it on.”

Whoops. Yep. Seeing it now.

“What’s it supposed to do?” Alicia, Ms. Malik’s more capable intern, asked.

“I don’t know,” Ms. Malik hummed thoughtfully, rubbing at her chin.

Steph did not stare.

She wanted to. But she also needed to keep the illusion for herself that Ms. Malik was the most sane and stable person in the department.

“You guys are going to figure out what it was supposed to do,” Ms. Malik decided. “I am going to go have a word with Director Siemons.”

Right, right. Cool.

“Any, uh, advice?” Steph asked as Ms. Malik turned to leave them all to it.

Ms. Malik paused and then shrugged.

“Try turning it on and then off again,” she said.

The thing which Mr. Parker had made was a deathtrap. That was its purpose, Steph and the others decided. It was a sentient robot which wanted only to hammer things into people’s limbs and heads. What it was supposed to hammer into those limbs and heads was anyone’s guess.

They got about forty-five minutes into taking it apart before a gasp of horror rang out through the room.

Mr. Parker’s step was silent. It was his superpower.

He was also horrified at the bloodbath happening on the table.

“Bambi,” he whimpered. “He killed Bambi. Oh my _god_.”

Chao and Wallace heard that whine and stopped in the hallway outside to peek in at the disaster.

Mr. Parker dragged hands through his hair and down his face in distress.

“She was just a baby,” he said tearfully.

“Woah, get a load of this car wreck,” Chao said like she cared nothing for her supervisor’s emotional state. “You made this, Parker?”

Mr. Parker was going to cry.

“It’s pretty shit, man, why’d you do that?” Wallace pointed out.

“She was so young,” Mr. Parker hiccupped. “I’m gonna fucking _kill him_.”

Amazing how quickly those words brought people into a room around here.

Mr. Stanton appeared as though called by God, took one look at the machine, and caught the back of Mr. Parker’s coat before he escaped the room for the elevator.

“We’re not killing anyone,” he said.

“_We’re_ doing nothing,” Mr. Parker said. “_I’m_ committing homicide. Let go or it’ll be homicide squared.”

“Peter,” Mr. Stanton said, “You love Mr. Stark.”

“You’re right, I should poison him,” Mr. Parker said.

“OH MY GOD, IT’S BAMBI,” Ms. Gupta shrieked, finally breaking through the crowd. “How could he, Peter? She was just a baby, that heartless _bastard_.”

Mr. Parker and Ms. Gupta were secretly tuned into the same brainwave. The only difference between them was that Mr. Parker was not as good at screaming his emotions.

“A life for a life,” Mr. Parker said solemnly.

“Peter, no,” Mr. Stanton said. “Someone get Ave.”

“A life for a life,” Ms. Gupta told Mr. Parker just as solemnly. “I’ll go with you.”

“Guys, no,” Mr. Stanton said.

“We need a burlap sack.”

“Oh my god, _Himani_. Stark was a POW, you can’t do that.”

“You’re right, my bad. We need a jack ‘o lantern and a pair of mittens.”

“HIMANI.”

“No, I need him to properly witness it,” Mr. Parker said. “All of it. Full face, bare hands.”

Mr. Stanton gestured helplessly at those two when Ms. James and Lab Manager Kilkenny rolled up. Lab Manager Kilkenny whistled at the carnage on the table top.

“Damn, isn’t that Bambi?” they asked.

Ms. James took a sip from her omnipresent coffee mug. Her hair was refusing to stay in its bun prison today, even more so than usual. She sniffed.

“I told you not to name shit, Parker,” she said. “Stark breaks everything he touches. I told you that.”

Mr. Parker made the saddest face ever at her.

“I made her for me,” he said pitifully.

Ms. James shook her head soberly.

“You made her for the world,” she said. “A short but loved existence, Pete. It’s the way with babies.”

The whole mass of nosy staff which had gathered took a moment to stare at her in shock and horror.

Mr. Parker sniffed.

“I guess,” he said. “But I loved her.”

“I know, bud,” Ms. James said. “Here, gimme a piece.”

Steph winced and sheepishly handed over the least dented, flattest piece of metal she could find in the wreckage. Ms. James took it and held it aloft.

“To you, Bambi, who lived such a short existence,” she said to the ceiling. “Your circuits were a nightmare. Parker burned three fingers in your name and dropped you on his foot twice. You were loved, little beasty. Now get ye off to that great big, bot crusher in the sky. Glory be to ye, Bambi.”

There was a low chorus of ‘glory be to you,’ and then Ms. James handed the piece over to Mr. Parker who took it miserably.

“Engrave it, add it to the pile and move on, man,” Ms. James said sagely, taking a sip of coffee. “You gotta move on.”

Mr. Parker pouted. Then nodded and wove through the crowd to go sulk in his office.

About five minutes later Dr. Siemons came into the room with Ms. Malik at her side. She surveyed the remnants of the impromptu funeral and looked back to Mr. Parker’s locked office door. She looked at the bot strewn across the table and took a moment to assess the situation with high eyebrows.

Ms. Malik glanced over to her.

“Salvageable?” she asked.

“Not a chance in hell,” Dr. Siemons said. “Bin it and move on.”

Steph looked at the bits and pieces of bot in her hands and suddenly felt sorry for the bot who had once been. God, who was she turning into?

Mr. Parker had a close relationship with Mr. Stark; this, everyone knew.

Mr. Stark had known Mr. Parker since he was just a little baby intern Peter. And it was clear from the way that Mr. Stark was always tromping up to Mr. Parker’s office and slamming open the door with no warning that there was a closeness there which extended beyond work.

Or so you’d think.

Steph wasn’t sure she’d seen closeness take the form of irreverence before, but there it was and it was glorious.

Just as Mr. Stark felt entitled to bust into Mr. Parker’s space with no warning, Mr. Parker felt entitled to call him things like ‘grandpa,’ ‘old man’ and ‘cranky old bastard.’ Sometimes, he spent whole days referring to Mr. Stark as Ironman or ‘employer’ to his face. Mr. Stark in turn referred to him as ‘puny human’ and ‘annoying bug-child,’ and ‘employee.’

No one else dared to talk this way to Mr. Stark. Yes, there was joking. Yes, there were people like Ms. James who stared at Mr. Stark like he was perpetually in her way. But the unfiltered, vocal disrespect was another thing entirely.

“One day,” Mr. Stark would threaten Mr. Parker, drumming his fingers against each other while slouching in Mr. Parker’s visitor chair, “I’m going to send you to Nice School.”

“Will I get overtime?” Mr. Parker would ask, deadpan.

“No.”

“Will it increase my salary?”

“No.”

“Will it require more effort from me than I am at present putting into this godforsaken position?”

“Most likely.”

“Fuck you, then.”

And Mr. Stark would seethe and plot. And Mr. Parker would stare and challenge him.

And they could do that for hours before someone brave enough (Ms. Potts) called down to shout at Mr. Stark to get back to wherever he was supposed to be and to leave ‘that poor boy’ alone.

Mr. Parker always won on account of being Ms. Potts’s favorite. Mr. Stark always pointed a finger at him and told him that his reign of terror wouldn’t last, mark his words, Parker.

And then the tense atmosphere that had frozen the hallway would dissipate and people could finally stop eavesdropping and go back to work.

Steph worked up the nerve to ask Mr. Parker why he was so willfully stubborn in Mr. Stark’s presence after one such incident.

“Someone needs to keep him humble,” Mr. Parker told her breezily. “I ain’t no dog and I ain’t no cog, join your local union.” And with that, he gave her a flier from the message board and tapped at it until she promised she’d look into it.

Steph decided that she wasn’t getting anything more detailed than that.

Outside of these moments of unparalleled fearlessness, Mr. Parker had zero chill which meant that he was the world’s worst sneaker of illicit materials into the building. Everyone snuck shit into the building, it was the way of things, but Mr. Parker was usually the one confiscating contraband. On the few occasions that he himself was the perpetrator of this high crime, Mr. Stark almost always caught him before he even got to the lab. Sometimes, however, just sometimes, he managed to get all the way up to his office before someone noticed he was trying to hide something.

This time it was a weird rat-dog thing.

It had passed through the metal detector which meant it was not metal, but the possibilities that opened up for what the thing actually was, was nothing short of terrifying.

Ms. Gupta stared at it in the hallway outside the office and then stared emptily back up at Mr. Parker.

“It didn’t move,” she said. “It’s a toy.”

“It doesn’t move,” Mr. Parker told her just as seriously. “It’s a toy.”

“It doesn’t move. It’s a toy,” Ms. Gupta told herself once more before turning around and going back into her lab.

Mr. Parker watched her go, glanced furtively into the office, and held Steph’s eye for a long, long time.

“It’s a toy,” he said as the fucking rat-Cerberus in his arms squirmed.

Steph did not scream. She was too cold and terrified inside to scream.

“It’s a toy,” she whimpered.

Mr. Parker nodded to her and then hurried off out of sight, scolding his “toy.”

An hour later heard a piercing scream down the hall, followed by Lab Manager Kilkenny coming crashing out of the lab to save their co-manager from whatever horrible fate had befallen her.

Ms. James was found standing on her chair, slowly turning in circles, pointing at the trashcan in the corner of the roof with huge, saucer-eyes. Steph had never seen her so awake.

“Get. It. OUT,” Ms. James shrieked, reaching decibels usually reserved on these few floors for Ms. Gupta.

Lab Manager Kilkenny bolstered themself up and located a dustpan. They approached the trashcan saying, “here, kitty, kitty.”

“WAIT, DON’T TOUCH HIM,” Mr. Parker screeched, flying into the room out of nowhere.

He and Lab Manager Kilkenny had a very strong argument over whether or not the thing in the trashcan needed to be killed with fire.

“He’s just hungry,” Mr. Parker argued in desperation.

“YOU SAID IT WAS A TOY,” Ms. James accused, still slowly spinning on her chair.

“Does it look like a toy??” Mr. Parker accused her right back as though she was the one overreacting here.

“If it’s not a toy, what is it?” Lab Manager Kilkenny demanded.

“He’s my _friend_,” Mr. Parker said. “He’s not hurting anyone. It’s okay, buddy, these people are scary. I know, honey—”

“PETER,” Ms. James shrieked. “That is NOT a friend.”

“Shut up, you’re scaring him,” Mr. Parker snapped over his shoulder. He fished the thrashing, hissing thing out of the trash and hugged it to his chest while it snarled at Ms. James. She jumped off her chair onto the desk.

“There, there, easy now,” Mr. Parker crooned to the furious creature in his arms. “You’re okay.”

“I’m calling Mr. Stark,” Ms. James said.

“No, you’re not,” Mr. Parker argued.

“I am!”

“You’re not!”

“I am!

“He’ll kill him!”

“That’s! The! POINT, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Ms. James called Mr. Stark.

Mr. Stark stood outside Mr. Parker’s office, which he’d secreted the rat-creature to and locked himself in. He did not appear surprised. Merely tired.

“This fucking kid,” he said, shaking his head. “This fucking kid.”

Mr. Stark was apparently aware of Mr. Parker’s relationship with the thing that he called ‘Throckmorton the Rat King.’

Mr. Stark was also aware that he’d told Mr. Parker on not one, not two, not even three, but upwards of five occasions to leave his mutated rat friend at his apartment in Queens.

“It is not sanitary, it is not holy, it is not publicly acceptable,” Steph and the others heard Mr. Stark lecturing as he picked the lock on the door. “I don’t care what crazy shit you do in your spare time, Pete, you know that. But this is shared space and we have talked about cultural conflicts of cuteness.”

“HE’S PRECIOUS,” Mr. Parker shouted through the door.

“He is literally hideous, possibly demonic; my grandmother would have had him exorcised on the spot,” Mr. Stark countered.

There was only rustling in response.

“I can _hear_ you hiding him, Peter. He’s a ten pound rat. He’s not hiding, son. Give it up now.”

“He’s only seven pounds,” Mr. Parker argued.

Mr. Stark dropped his forehead against the door.

It took fifteen minutes and a terrifying display of Mr. Stark’s lost career as a locksmith for the Rat King and his vassal to be extracted from Mr. Parker’s office.

The Rat King was pleased with this development. The Rat King hissed with two of its heads at Mr. Stark and tried to bite him with the third one.

Mr. Stark threatened to call animal control. Mr. Parker told him if he did, he was quitting the company right there on the spot.

“Peter,” Mr. Stark groaned.

“He gets lonely at home,” Mr. Parker argued. “He only comes to see me a couple times a month and then he’s super attached. I can’t just lock him in my apartment, Mr. Stark. Look at him. He’ll starve.”

Mr. Stark was not convinced this chimeric monstrosity would starve, no matter how long Mr. Parker held it up to his face. He did, however, have to stoop to more pedantic pet-ownership arguments to get Mr. Parker to see anything resembling reason.

“He’s not vaccinated, Pete. No tags. You can’t even let a dog into the streets without vaccinations. We can’t have him in the building.”

Mr. Parker set his jaw.

The next day, the Rat King returned. Tagged, collared, and furious.

“No,” Mr. Stark said that midday, when complaints finally filtered up to him from that morning. “Peter. No. Just—no.”

“He is tagged,” Mr. Parker said mutinously. “The vet says he is healthy.”

Mr. Stark held his face in his hands at the thought that they were all having which was ‘you found it a _vet_?’

“_Healthy_, Tony,” Mr. Parker reiterated. “He’ll have his next round of shots next week. He does not have rabies.”

The rat king struggled with its muscle-y front paws to pick up another French fry from the pile Mr. Parker had made for it on a piece of paper. The heads fought over which one got to eat it until Mr. Parker absentmindedly turned the thing sideways for it so that all the heads could have a go.

Steph felt the scream in the back of her throat start whistling a little. She swallowed a couple of times to keep it from escaping.

“I—Pepper,” Mr. Stark decided. “This is a Pepper issue.”

“He’s disgusting,” Ms. Potts, who never, ever came down to the lab, said.

Mr. Parker gasped and smothered the Rat King’s many heads, trying to cover all its ears.

“How _dare_ you,” he hissed. “This is my _son_.”

There was a long pause.

“Peter,” Ms. Potts said carefully, “Are you taking your meds?”

So Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark knew Mr. Parker like, way personally. Good to know.

Also good to see Mr. Parker’s mutinous, borderline childish, jaw clench.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re not,” Ms. Pott observed.

“I take them every day,” Mr. Parker said through his gritted teeth.

“Peter, if you took your meds, you’d feel a little less manic right now,” Ms. Potts said reasonably. Mr. Stark made a skeptical expression and got his toes stomped on for it.

He cleared his throat once he recovered.

“I get you’re all about following your whackjob lawyer friend’s example, kid, but meds are not option and this…thing being in this building is not either,” he negotiated with Ms. Potts nodding along to back him up.

Mr. Parker stared at them both in silence for a long, long time.

“PETER BENJAMIN PARKER.”

“FUCK OFF, OLD MAN, I’M OUTTIE.”

“PETER, YOU GET YOUR TAIL BACK IN HERE—”

“EAT MY ASS.”

Ms. Potts watched the hallway scuffle and sighed, drumming a few fingers against her nose.

“I don’t know what I expected,” she finally observed.

“Have they always been like this?” Lab Manager Stanton asked for everyone else.

Ms. Potts considered Mr. Stark’s powerstance—it looked like him pinning Mr. Parker to a wall and apparently threatening him with bodily harm—and hummed.

“When Peter was smaller, Tony would just pick him up and dump him in the breakroom in his lab until appropriate behavior was agreed upon,” she said.

She twitched violently and looked down and everyone else followed her to see the Rat King sniffing at her foot. One of the heads looked up at her.

“Oh, hell no,” she said.

Mr. Parker was triumphant, having gotten his way in the end. He hugged the Rat King to his chest while Mr. Stark seethed at him from a safe distance of three feet.

The Rat King would not be handled by anyone else. The Rat King had decided that it wanted Ms. Potts to be its second vassal.

Ms. Potts objected strongly to this.

“This is not success,” Mr. Stark warned Mr. Parker and the Rat King. “This is a temporary situation. He does not come back into this building, so help me God, Peter Parker.”

“They like you,” Mr. Parker told the Rat King.

“Don’t fucking tell him that. Don’t you dare tell him that,” Mr. Stark warned.

“They _like_ you,” Mr. Parker sang louder this time.

The Rat King was pleased. It stopped squirming and took the opportunity to sniff around in a circle at everyone.

Steph wanted to puke.

“Good boy,” Mr. Parker said.

Mr. Stark’s neck veins became very prominent. Ms. Potts put a hand on the back of his neck and breathed purposefully and slowly.

“Until the end of the day, Peter,” she said. “Then please leave him with your aunt. Or MJ or anywhere which is not within two miles of this location.” ]

Mr. Parker thought about this.

“I’ll give him to Wade,” he said. “He hates him. He keeps trying to poison him.”

Mr. Stark started to say something to that, but a few more crushed toes stopped him in his tracks.

“Yeah,” he wheezed. “Wade. Leave him with Wade.”

The Rat King did not return to the building.

The rumors among the staff regarding Mr. Parker’s association with black magic hit an all time high. Steph thought that he kind of liked how everyone tried to escape his presence in the aftermath of it all.

Steph found herself, only a couple of months into her internship, offered the chance to jump ship and be moved up to the inorganics department. That was where the real money was. That was the kind of role that would guarantee you a future job basically anywhere you wanted.

It was bonkers to be offered it as a seventeen, almost eighteen-year-old.

Her mom and dad were so proud. Her brother was jealous beyond belief.

The satisfaction warmed her belly.

But she found that she didn’t want to leave the organics folks. They were all nuts. They were more than a handful. No matter how many times she asked them to put papers in one place, they were guaranteed to put them somewhere else. Possibly under hazardous waste.

But they had a certain kind of heart to them. A lovable kind of chaos.

She toured the inorganics department. Its halls were weirdly quiet. There were a lot of closed doors and people muttering to themselves in rooms. There was more delirious cackling than she’d expected, although this was muffled ominously by all the doors covered in fliers for events all over the city.

If she was a mechanical engineer, she was sure the place would feel like heaven with all its computer labs and fancy equipment. But there was something about it—it was all too clean. Most of the work was done on computers. There were chalkboards all over the place for those who preferred them.

Steph hated chalk. God, get into the twenty-first century, y’all.

Nah.

She decided that she herself was a messy, gross human being.

The messy, gross human beings of the organic department’s type spoke to her. She’d bonded with them. Had imprinted on Mr. Parker.

There was nothing else would do, now. So she went back to the organics department to a rousing cheer.

Mr. Parker was curiously missing from the group.

“Oh, he couldn’t bear the thought of you leaving,” Ms. Malik said. “He’s wringing his hands in the breakroom telling himself that interns have agency and it’s fine if they want to improve themselves.”

Oh, Mr. Parker.

Steph snuck into the breakroom and found the scene exactly as Ms. Malik described, with Mr. Parker pacing around, mumbling to himself.

She waited until he wasn’t looking and tackled him from behind playfully and found herself three feet off the floor, held against a wall by Mr. Parker’s broad hands.

He blinked in surprise. She blinked back.

“WOW, IT’S YOU,” he said, pulling her down and setting her on her feet. He patted her on the top of the head while she was still in shock, trying to process what had just happened.

“You came back!” Mr. Parker observed cheerfully. Then he paused. “Why’d you come back? Did someone say something to you? Who was it? What’s their name? I’ll find ‘em and—”

Steph shook herself and realized Mr. Parker was offering to go reopen hostilities between the organics and inorganics departments again on her behalf.

“No, no,” she said. “It’s nothing, it’s just, uh. I like it better here. That’s all.”

There was a pause.

“Even though I brought Throckie to work?” Mr. Parker asked like a shamed primary school kid.

She put on her most stoic face.

“Even though you brought Throckie to work,” she promised.

Mr. Parker lit up like Christmas.

“I knew you liked him,” he said.

“Wait, no,” she choked.

“Hey, we should celebrate the upkeep of the team!” Mr. Parker stuck his head out into the hall and called “Food and drinks?”

A battle cry answered him. He spun back to Steph beaming.

“I’ll run home and bring him to dinner,” he said. “So he can congratulate you, too.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Steph whimpered.

“Oh, I know I don’t have to, but I’m gonna,” Mr. Parker said, patting her shoulder heavily. “Just for you.”

Steph had lived in the city for a while now, but she hadn’t been this far into Queens. Mr. Parker lived in Queens. A couple of the other researchers did, too, and there was a brief, but heated discussion about the best place to have a celebratory dinner at. Chinese food was eventually agreed upon and Steph found herself texting her parents to say that she wouldn’t be home for dinner.

You know, just going out with the coworkers.

Like an adult.

Like adults do.

There might be a giant three-headed rat.

Just sayin’.

She’d agreed to this being her new normal for the next six months. And, well, it was better than just slogging through for the name and the money. She’d give it that.

**Author's Note:**

> descriptors of the lab managers can be found here: https://deniigi.tumblr.com/post/185228780392/  
and there are couple other research staff on Peter's team who didn't appear in this fic: Wu, Medvedev, Gonzalez, and Rosenberg.


End file.
